This translation is, like the plays of Sophocles, in verse. It tries to do justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies; it aims to flow through reading towards realization in action and sound. The rhythmical language aspires, in other words, to be spoken and enacted; and the wording seeks to infuse musicality and physicality into the dramatic texture as a whole.
There is a widespread supposition, especially in Britain, that plain prose keeps somehow ‘closer’ to the original Greek, and that unobtrusive modesty is somehow more ‘faithful’. It is my view, on the contrary, that by turning what is variegated into monochrome, and what is polyphonic into monotone, such translations become essentially alienated from their originals. Joseph Brodsky wrote:1 ‘Translation is a search for an equivalent, not for a substitute. . . . A translator should begin his work with a search for at least a metrical equivalent of the original form.’ I strongly agree, and this means abandoning the safe pedestrian homogeneity that is the hallmark of so many modern translations. Poetry calls for poetry, or, at the very least, for crafted verse.
There are, in fact, two quite different kinds of verse within Greek tragedy, as was initially explained on p. xxiv above. In keeping with Brodsky’s tenet, I have striven for two quite distinct measures in English. About three-quarters of each Sophocles play is set in the spoken metre of Greek drama, the iambic trimeter, a line of twelve syllables on an iambic base.2 At first sight this may look remarkably similar to the ten-syllable line of English blank verse, but, in fact, the ‘short/long’ patterning of ancient Greek is a very different dynamic from the ‘weak/strong’ patterning of English. Ancient Greek verse was not stress-based, as is English (and modern Greek), but was based on syllable-lengths. It is not easy for us (Anglophones) to sense how such patterning could provide form and musicality, but it is indisputable that that is how it was. Despite this fundamental difference, I have still found that, for me, the English stressed iambic is the best metrical equivalent for the Greek quantitative iambic.3 I have set up a pulse that is basically iambic, but with no regular line length, and anything between four and fourteen syllables in a line. Quite frequently ending a line between a weak and a strong syllable also serves to break up any metronomic regularity of the beat.
The remaining portions of the tragedies, a quarter or so, are nearly all set in highly complex and patterned measures, conveniently labelled as ‘lyric’ (see also above, pp. xxv–xxvi). Most of these, the ‘odes’, were composed to be performed by the chorus in unified song, but there are also some lyrics which are shared in a kind of ‘lyric dialogue’ between actors and chorus. So far as metre and poetry are concerned, however, they are generally like the songs, not like the spoken iambics. Most, though not all, of both these kinds of lyric are arranged in pairs of metrically identical stanzas, presumably sung and danced identically, even though they can be quite contrasting in tone and subject-matter.4 Tellingly, no two stanza-patterns in the whole of surviving tragedy are completely the same; we have, that is to say, several hundred pairs of stanzas, and every single pair is metrically unique.
Complex verses like this, made for setting to music, are not standard in English poetry, so any metrical equivalent is bound to be technically very different.5 Most song-lyrics in English—from Elizabethan airs to hymns to modern musicals—are organized in fairly short stanzas with clearly marked rhythms. This verse-form is generally what I have gone for in order to achieve something of the equivalence that Brodsky called for. I do not pretend that my verse-forms and rhythms have any direct technical link with Sophocles’ original metrics. I have arrived at them in a rather intuitive way, usually by letting some English phrases mull around in my mind until they coalesce into a ground-pattern on which to build.
These verse-forms are much simpler than the Greek measures, but they can at least aspire to musicality, audibility, and accessibility. More often than not I have also exploited rhymes, or half-rhymes, or off-rhymes of one kind or another. I have been encouraged in this by something of a renaissance of rhyming and tight verse-forms in the poetry in English of our times.6 And rhyme has, after all, been perennially used in popular song of all periods. And tragic lyrics were the popular song of their day.
But what other features of Sophocles’ verbal and dramatic craft call for some kind of equivalent in translation? Above all, what about ‘diction’? What kind of level and tone and crafting of language is called for to give some idea of the expressiveness of the Greek? Again there is the basic division between the spoken iambics and the sung lyrics. Aristotle in his Poetics observes that the iambic metre is ‘particularly speakable’. This is an important pointer; but, at the same time, it does not mean that the iambic parts are naturalistically imitative of everyday talk. The diction of tragic iambics is constantly expressing things in slightly unexpected, unordinary ways that heighten or sharpen its blend of meaning. While many of the lines are made out of everyday words, they are not put together in everyday ways. This is particularly true of Sophocles, and it is a difficult challenge to reflect this in translation.
There is also a scattering of higher-flown phrasing and vocabulary, and some word-forms that occur only in poetry. The Greek embraces both the colloquial and the poetical; it positively refuses a bland, unperturbed diction. I try to match this unpredictability in my translation. While I do not want to produce incongruities which stick out like a sore thumb, I do seek variety of tone and level; and I do not hesitate to use phrases and vocabulary that may surprise.7 It is a standard negative criticism levelled at translations that they include turns of phrase that are either too low in diction, or too high, according to the taste of the reviewer. But this easy complaint is not necessarily valid, because such variability is there in the original.
No one would dispute that the spoken parts of any translation of Greek tragedy should be ‘speakable’. That claim usually, however, means no more than that they are evenly worded and avoid phonetically awkward turns of phrase. I aspire to something more than that, which also makes the speech ‘listenable’ as well as speakable. Plain homogenous lines do not sustain attention: for Sophocles’ spoken lines to come alive in English, some strangeness is needed, some twist, some grit. I hope that my verses will give people phrasings to be accentuated and relished out loud, something to ‘get their mouth around’. I would even encourage readers to speak the words under their breath as they go along. Or, even better, gather in groups or classes or workshops and perform them out loud.
The sung lyrics are expressed in an appreciably more artful poetic register, and are even harder to capture in an English equivalent. They use a fair few rare and high-flown wordings, often put into quite twisted and artificial phrasings—indeed, they tend towards being ‘difficult’. At the same time they still cohere as a challenging train-of-thought, and it would be a serious mistake to think of them as inaccessible to their audiences. A long and strong tradition of choral lyric in ancient Greece at religious and other ceremonial occasions meant that people were highly attuned to this kind of language and to its oblique thought-sequences. The lyrics were also undoubtedly audible. The organization of the Greek theatre budgeted for long rehearsal periods, and these prepared audibility and comprehensibility as high priorities. So I have attempted to find line-shapes and stanza-forms in English that allow the diction to be rich and strange, while at the same time restraining it from floating off towards the inflated or weird. My lyrics are considerably less challenging and less intricately crafted than the originals (and may sometimes be more doggerel than poetry!), but that is the price of making accessibility and audibility into priorities.8
The other consideration to be always borne in mind is the fact that the lyrics of tragedy were originally set to music, and were sung and danced. So musicality, or rather ‘musicability’, is something else to be worked into the translation-blend so far as possible. I have moulded them in the hope that these versions of the lyrics might one day be set to music and sung.
As well as these matters of metre and diction, there is the further crucial requirement of performance and performability. Although this version has been made for publication, it still conveys, I hope, the powerful theatricality of Sophocles. I have done my best to pitch the words so that they are not just compatible with being acted out on stage, but so that they might be positively integrated, and indeed mutually enhancing, with embodiment as well as with delivery. I have also followed the usual convention of adding stage-directions (see further p. xxxv below).
Greek tragedies were all-embracing artworks. They inextricably combined poetry, music, dance, movement, speech, spectacle. No translation can do justice to all of this ever-shifting multiformity, but there is, surely, some value in the attempt.